GROSS/13 1925 - a big, individualist war epic
There's something very Christopher Nolan about The Big Parade.
Gross is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
THE BIG PARADE, KING VIDOR, MGM, 1925, 151 MINUTES, U.S GROSS $18–22M
I keep promising a short review. I keep failing abjectly. These 100 year-old films wrap themselves around you. Something about the novelty of the form, I suppose. About the pell-mell advance of capital and invention when everything’s new.
A film from the 1920s will vividly carry forward a convention from an earlier era - like the Wild West shows embedded in The Covered Wagon. Or the cast will contain a handful of individuals with transcendent talent or a deep hinterland - like the incandescent Mabel Normand in Mickey. Or the storytelling will be so sophisticated as to defy a film’s location on the timeline - like Rex Ingram’s wonderful Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Or - this one is very common - a formal innovation I’d assumed belonged to recent years will show up decades ahead of time - like the electronic surveillance storyline in the very first film reviewed here - Traffic in Souls - or the wildly innovative underwater sequences in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
So I’m blaming the filmmakers. I can’t keep my reviews short because their films are too interesting. Sorry.
500 words about King Vidor’s The Big Parade
I promise - it’s 500 words! I’ve saved you ten minutes of your day. You can thank me later.
I’d love to have met King Vidor. I could have done: he lived well into the Reagan era. His first and last acting role came in 1981.
Vidor was an American individualist - he made films about grafters and rebels and over-achievers. Always individuals set against vast, dumb, institutional antagonists or buried in impersonal machines - armies, industries, cities. His movies were often huge, ambitious projects. There’s a Nolan energy to The Big Parade. It’s a war movie but it’s a BIG, consequential war movie - and it’s a journey.
Our hero, James "Jim" Apperson’, a bow-tied Park Avenue playboy who barely notices when America joins the war, is persuaded to enlist by the most trivial means - he likes the music at the recruitment parade. His equally shallow girlfriend, to whom he is betrothed, assumes he’ll be off to France because it’s what all the young gentlemen are doing - like going to the Hamptons in August or something.
Enlisting, of course, is the making of Jim. At bootcamp he bonds with two working class recruits. Slim is a labourer from the South (this is indicated by his lumbering gait and his big, stupid grin). He chews tobacco constantly - spitting becomes a theme - and plays tricks on the others. Bull is a wise-cracking bartender (nothing stupid about Bull - he’s from The Bronx).
We bond with them too, of course. Slim and Bull become Jim’s wingmen - these are great characters with comedy and pathos (and when we lose them - to the fate of all supporting characters in a war movie - it’s gut-wrenching). They defer to his sophistication and intelligence (and mock him constantly). In this middle section, while the boys wait for action, square-bashing and chatting up the local girls, the war grandly unfolds around them. The assistance of the American military means Vidor has vast resources to call on: convoys of trucks extend to the horizon, biplanes fly in formation as they march to the front. This is the Nolan bit - no back-projections here.
In this hiatus Jim falls in love with a local girl, Mélisande, played by French actress Renée Adorée (you can actually tell she’s speaking French). The love endures and, after the war, when amputee Jim returns to France they are reunited, in a kind of Monty Python way (there’s a scene that I’m quite sure is a quote from The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse that you have to watch).
It’s been said that the Big Parade is an anti-war film. It’s not. But the comparison with Rex Ingram’s explicitly anti-war Four Horsemen is useful because it’s not a pro-war film either - Vidor is just not really interested in the war. Where the Ingram film is tense with angry disapproval, Vidor is here only for Jim’s journey - finding his dignity in anonymity and military order. The war is incidental, a backdrop - It could have been any sufficiently complex and alienating phenomenon. 25 years later - in his adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead - it was orthodoxy and conformity in the consumer age. In Stella Dallas it was the rigidity of class.
I watched the film on YouTube. The film has been restored but I don’t this is it.
It seems to be so often the case that, when researching these bits, I look up an actor and notice that their timeline comes to a tragic halt soon after the film was made. This is the case with our Mélisande, played by Renée Adorée. She contracted tuberculosis in 1930 and died in 1933. Brutal times.
Here's a list of all the top-grossing films since 1913 and here's my Letterboxd list.
And here’s another top-grossing list.